


Things Look Dire

by PadaWinBaby



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: AU, Infected Verse, M/M, Minor Character Death, mutant pneumonia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 16:54:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4927612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PadaWinBaby/pseuds/PadaWinBaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Geoff is ill as dicks, in a  world where that could mean so much more, and it's up to Michael to take care of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Look Dire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mightbeanasshole](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mightbeanasshole/gifts).



Geoff had been sick for a long time. Fuck, longer than Michael could remember. But then, his memory these days didn't stretch far past the outbreak. He remembered where they'd been when the news broke, tangled and sweaty on Michael's bed, enjoying the afterglow. He almost hadn't let Geoff answer his cell phone, not ready for reality to intrude on their bliss. If it hadn't been Burnie's face on the screen, Geoff might've listened, and then where would they be? It was a mutated strain of pneumonia, and it was doing horrific things to the human race.

Geoff's fever was high again. Not that it wasn't always high. Michael could hear the rattle in his lover's chest when he breathed, see the tiny wrinkle in his brow as he struggled to stay afloat in the ocean of fluid in his own lungs. Once brain death occurred, Michael would have to put him down, and that was something he dreaded with every fiber of his being.

"Come on, asshole," Michael murmured into Geoff's sweaty hair. The man's skin was pale and waxy under the lines and colors of his tattoos, and it broke Michael's heart. Geoff barely stirred, waving him off weakly. That was a good sign, at least. "You gotta stay hydrated, asshole," Michael pressed, his usual nickname not holding the same venom it normally would. "I need you to stay hydrated. We need to make it through this. I can't lose you, too." Geoff cracked tired eyes and looked at him, though his gaze was unfocused and hazy. “Shh,” he whispered. “Daddy’s sleepin’.” Michael hated the slur in his words, knowing that it wasn’t from alcohol. He pressed the mouth of a bottle of Pedialyte to his lips. “Daddy can go back to sleep once he’s drunk this entire bottle,” he murmured, pressing kisses to Geoff’s pale temple.

He had to wait until Geoff’s coughing jag rattled to a halt, the older man having taken too deep a breath in an attempt to retort, but he eventually got Geoff to drink. Food was another story entirely. The older man categorically refused to chew anything Michael gave him, but he also complained when he was given soup, so the younger man force-fed him oatmeal when he was being obstinate. He’d gotten him to eat some Jell-O at one point, but that had led to Geoff laughing at his own joke about Jell-O shots without liquor and launching himself into another severe coughing fit.

Michael had long since lost track of time. Everything was fever and paranoia, his time split between tending his ailing lover and venturing out into the unforgiving Austin heat for supplies. The hospitals were overrun and pharmacies picked clean, so he had to venture further afield than he would like. On top of that, something about the mutation of the virus meant that brain death didn’t cause body death, but rather a hungry, shambling activity that had the news calling it the Zombie Flu for the weeks before it was upgraded from epidemic to pandemic. At first, Michael had been pleased that the flu Geoff had was firmly in the pneumonia zone, thinking that maybe it would work its way out of his system without causing the kind of brain death he’d heard about on the news. Now, he wasn’t so certain, largely because he’d watched their friends die off, one by one, and Jack, poor, lovely Jack, had fallen into walking death from pneumonia in his final days. What was worse, though, was that, without hospital treatment, Geoff wasn’t improving. He was just...lingering.

“Hey,” Michael whispered one night, when Geoff’s fever was the highest it had been yet. “Do you remember that trip we took to Palm Beach?” His hands rubbed idly over Geoff’s chest, trying to sooth away the wet bubbling sound that worsened with the man’s every breath. Geoff trembled beneath his touch, wracked by chills, and nodded weakly. “It was our first trip after hooking up. I thought you were gonna fire me, to be honest. I thought you were gonna put me on a plane and send me back to Jersey with my tail between my legs because you couldn’t deal.” Geoff’s light-colored eyes drifted closed as Michael spoke. Michael wished that didn’t scare him so much. “Until the moment that plane touched down, I was convinced that I was going home, and I hated it. I was shaking so bad when we got our bags. You remember, I threw my bag at you and demanded that we find a bar before you even thought about getting me into bed? I didn’t want to admit how relieved I was, but I think you knew. I could see it in the way you smiled at me while I ordered every goddamn expensive, girly drink on the menu.” Geoff wheezed weakly, clearly trying to laugh. Michael rubbed harder. “But damn, I’d never wanted your dick in my ass as much as I did when I saw that goddamn suite you’d rented. Remember what I said?” He looked down at Geoff, trying to engage him.

“Coffee...table...callgirl,” Geoff hissed, the words garbled and breathy. He trailed off into awful, wet coughs again, and Michael grimaced, regretting his choice to get him talking. He pressed an apologetic kiss to the crown of Geoff’s head. “Best sex of my life, right there on that damn glass coffee table,” he murmured. It wasn’t really a sentence, but it didn’t really have to be. Geoff covered the hand rubbing his chest with his own. The skin beneath his tattoos had taken on a greyish tinge since this most recent fever spike. It hurt to look at, but Michael was glad that Geoff had the strength to move at all right now.

It was something like a week later, while he was out wandering from shop to shop, checking to see if there was any way he’d missed something they needed, that Michael actually stopped and thought about it. The thought stopped him dead in his tracks, standing in the middle of a picked-over aisle of baby food. His health had always sort of been the unacknowledged elephant in the room, hadn’t it? While Geoff laid in what had once been their bed, wasting away, Michael was the poster child for peak fucking health, wasn’t he? Fuck, why hadn’t he seen it sooner? The overarching realization that he was probably the only legitimately healthy human being in the entirety of fucking Austin, Texas set his feet in motion again, running flat-out to the nearest hospital. Geoff’s well-being sank to the very back of his mind, replaced by the urgency of getting somewhere that had people who could examine this whole fucked up situation more closely. He didn’t want to think the word “cure”, but it crept into his thoughts unbidden.

17 hours and several syringes later, Michael left the hospital, a vial of his own blood in his pocket and a half-baked idea clanking around in his skull. Part of him acknowledged that there was no possible way this could work, but that thought was drowned out by the throb of hope in his chest. The lab tech who’d examined his blood sample had been optimistic about making a cure from it, taking a couple of pints’ worth to work with and sending Michael on his way, but it was quite an intuitive leap from “we could probably make a cure from this” to “our blood has magical healing powers”.

Back at the apartment, Michael ran through his usual steps for checking on Geoff: check his breathing, check his pulse, check his temp, try to wake him. After that was responsiveness exercises. Michael gave him a few simple instructions and waited to see if he could follow them. He always started small. “Squeeze my hand. Now the other one. Move your head. Now your toes.” Today, the fever had broken a little, sinking back to safer, but not perfect, levels. The rattle in his chest wasn’t as wet. Michael’s little bubble of hope swelled in his chest. He produced the secreted vial and accompanying syringe out of his hoodie pocket and loaded it up with a couple of CCs of his blood. He had no idea if their blood types were even compatible, and he never would have tried something this risky under any other stupid circumstances, but he really had nothing to lose if this didn’t work. Geoff was already an inch from death. He could only linger so long. Michael fumbled through finding a vein on Geoff’s arm, going solely on what he’d witnessed at the hospital hours before. “I’ve got some new medicine for you to try, boss,” Michael whispered, his voice shaking. He didn’t look at Geoff’s face, afraid of what he’d see there if he did. Finally, he pressed the tip of the needle into Geoff’s skin, watching the flesh part for the metallic intruder, and pressed the plunger slowly until every drop of red was emptied from it. He pulled the needle out as gently as he could and pocketed everything again before moving to make something to eat. All he could do now was wait.

Geoff improved by degrees, as pneumonia patients were wont to do. He was more lucid during the day, even if talking too much still made him cough and wheeze. Every night, right before Michael allowed him to go to sleep, he added another dose of his blood to Geoff’s. After a month, the color came back to his cheeks, and the light crept back into Michael’s life, shoving away the niggling thought that if they really could make a cure from his blood, it’d only be a matter of time before someone came looking for him.

Finally, after months of stress and worry, Geoff was better. He wasn’t quite perfect. His voice had lost its squeaky quality to all that coughing, and his muscles were weak with atrophy, but he was alive, and that’s all either of them cared about. The first day he could take a deep breath without coughing or wheezing, Geoff took his young lover to bed. Michael ended up doing most of the work, teasing Geoff relentlessly about being a brittle, feeble old man as he slid up and down that beautiful, pierced cock for the first time in ages, but they were both happy that he hadn’t died.

It was another two weeks, during which Michael gently coaxed Geoff’s lazy ass through exercises to help rebuild his lost muscle, before they heard hide or hair of the hospital. News came the way news tended to, via the TV that had been left on continuously in spite of the lack of electricity to power it. The power suddenly kicked back on, lights blinking in darkened rooms, the air conditioner whirring to life, and the television announcing a return to normalcy, or what passed for it. The news anchor, who looked just as haggard as Geoff in the aftermath of their own obvious illness, thanked an anonymous contributor for the two and a half pints of blood, which had been swiftly and efficiently fabricated into the very cure that was sweeping the city. Citizens were urged to seek help at the local hospital, and teams were being dispatched to bring the cure to those who weren’t strong enough to get it on their own. Nothing could be done for those already lost to the illness, but clean-up crews were being conscripted to herd the bodies together for identification once their loved ones were able. Now that the scientists knew what to look for, the information was being spread around like wildfire, and hospitals elsewhere started manufacturing their own versions, from healthy members of their own populace. Before long, cures were being air dropped to foreign countries, and the general outlook was beginning to look more positive than it had in the past year or two.

Then Michael got sick.


End file.
